Never, Ever Give Up

Giving up can be so tempting. Chucking it all to free up your calendar, your head and your peace of mind. Easier said than done in some cases. Too easy in others.

The advice is age-old and profoundly wise. Necessary, too, if we are to keep moving forward. We recommit to life every single morning. I have found it easier when there is an endgame at play. A specific goal to work towards that would take me somewhere I wanted to go.

I also found that the motivation to keep going was intimately tied to how I felt about myself. It was also tied to who I was living for. I think that goes for everyone.

What we do every day shapes our daily activities and our self-image. Choosing to engage with life is a decision that we make over and over again.

The harsh truth is there really is no lasting form of escape, save death. And even that is debatable and creates consequences we cannot fully determine after we are gone.

The thought of inflicting mortal emotional and psychological wounds on our loved ones should be enough to dissuade anyone from making rash decisions. But it does happen and its outfall can be hideous.

I once read of a hapless son whose life was upended when his relatively young mother died through assisted suicide against his deepest wishes. He appeared incapable of surviving her loss and, worse, that he had been helpless to prevent how she died.

His tirade was leveled at the administrators of her assisted death and how they acted in spite of the impact of her untimely loss on her loved ones.

I have been deeply emotionally distraught and felt helpless and hopeless to change my situation. I don’t believe I was ever in the type of pain that would have justified choosing death when there were other options to resolve my difficulties.

It was not enough that my situation seemed unresolvable to me. It was more that I was not fully compos mentis or mature enough to make that determination.

Life sheds many souls who can no longer bear their circumstances or the chronic despair they cradle inside. I can only imagine the mental agony that drives them to self-annihilation.

A soldier who watched his best friend rent asunder by an IED. A woman trying to make sense of why the “good guy” she knew casually raped and humiliated her. A terminal stage ALS patient who is on the brink of losing any capacity to function independently. The list goes on ad infinitum.

Staying the course through the worst physical pain imaginable or by carrying unbearable emotional agony changes us. It can soften us and lead us to a deeper level of empathy with our fellow human beings.

The gritty and painful parts of life are as much a part of the whole as the good bits. Integrating its’ agony and ecstasy not only offer the opportunity to become wiser and deeper human beings but more capable of relating to others.

Of course, it is only by hanging in and staying the course that we have a chance to apply the lessons of the pain we’ve survived to the life we create moving forward.

And to belabor the obvious, we can only do that if we are still here. Never, ever give up.